Desperate Times: Of Carts and Sisters
by Ogehsim
Summary: Ch 2: Nellie's a baker, a widow, and an accomplice to murder, but she may have also started the French Revolution. First ST fic. Now a TWOSHOT
1. Hard times and Relatives

_gasp What is Ogehsim doing, writing a Sweeney Todd fic and straying from her KP roots? No worry to any KP fans, I have a story in the works, see my profile. For the rest of you, I present my first Sweeney Todd fic. When Mrs. Lovett sang "Men'd think it was a treat, Findin' poor animals, Wot are dyin' in the street!" it made me think of the scene in a Tale of Two Cities when a wine cask breaks, and this is the result. Obviously a bit of an AU, esp. because the time periods don't quite align, but this is fanfiction, no? Also much of the first part is paraphrased from Dickens, so no flames about plagarism alright? Those bits aren't mine, neither are any of the characters. Thanks to MST3KguruK10 for beta-ing!_

* * *

A cart, carrying its load of large carcasses and smaller live animals, had broken in the street. The accident had happened in turning a corner; a cobblestone had protruded more than usual from the street and the cart had lost a wheel and crashed into a wall, the wooden slats shattering, and the meat lay on the stones just outside the door of the pie-shop.

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and tear off pieces of the raw flesh. Some men kneeled down and tore the chunks off with their fingers, or tried to help women who bent over their shoulders. Others, men and women, dipped handkerchiefs from the women's heads into the puddling blood, which were then squeezed dry into infants' mouths. Others, directed by lookers-on at high windows, darted here and there, to catch the running chickens and other small fowl that ran off in new directions; others devoted themselves to the blood-sodden slats and cheap paper used to wrap the meat, licking, and even champing the moister fragments with eager relish. Even the bones were cracked and sucked until dry of their marrow. Not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.

A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices--voices of men, women, and children--resounded in the street while this meat-game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the meat was gone these demonstrations ceased as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he had been cutting set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it. Men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved away to descend again, and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

The meat's blood had stained the ground of the narrow Fleet Street in London, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the slats had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy blood-lees: BLOOD.

The time was to come, when that would be even more abundantly spilled, and when the taste of it would be upon the tongues of many there.

And now that the cloud settled on Fleet Street, which a momentary gleam had driven from its countenance, the darkness of it was heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on its presence--nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young. The mill which had worked them down was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and ploughed into every furrow of age, was the sigh: Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper. Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off. Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal among its refuse of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-pussy preparation that was offered for sale.

The pie-shop was a corner shop, no better than any other, and possibly worse, in its appearance and degree, and the mistress of the pie-shop had stood outside it, in a dark black and red dress that revealed perhaps a bit too much, looking on at the struggle for the lost meat. "It ain't me concern," said she, with a final shrug of the shoulders. "Them from the market di' it."

There, her eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke, she called to him across the way: "Say then, wot do ya do there? Do ya wan' ta go ta Bedlam?" said the pie-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it. "Do ya wan' the Beadle and the Judge ta come down on our 'eads? Is there nowhere else ta write such words?"

She wiped her soiled hand upon the joker's clothes, such as they were--quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on his account; and then recrossed the road and entered the pie-shop. "Times is hard indeed," she murmured to the slumped sacks of coarse flour. Still, it would soon get better, it had to, now that Benjamin Barker had returned; returned no less as the hate-driven Sweeney Todd. Not a few hours earlier had they concocted their devious plot to turn the filth of the black pit that was London into pies. After all, desperate times called for desperate measures.

* * *

"Letter for a Missus Lovett." The call was issued loudly over the chattering heads that filled the small shop.

The woman in question plunked two pies and a hearty beaker of ale down on a table, and called to a young boy, "Toby, be a dear and grab the letter from 'im."

"Right m'um." He dutifully retrieved the letter and set it on the counter where it could be retrieved later. Then he had to hurry to fill the raucous demand for another round of ale.

The letter taunted Nellie Lovett all day; it was rare that she ever received a letter, seeing as she had no living relations nor any friends who'd bother. However, she was kept constantly busy as when there were no customers to serve, there were pies to be prepared for the next rush and the shop to be tidied.

Finally the sign was flipped to "closed" with a sigh of relief, and ignoring the dirty plates left on the tables, Nellie rushed to the letter and tore open it's plain envelope. She read it's contents quickly before turning to Toby.

"Toby, I'm gonna go see if Mr. T needs anything. Can ya sweep up the shop? I'll get dinner when I come down."

"Righty-o m'um." The flour-covered floor found itself under attack by broom.

Sweeney Todd had been rather enjoying the silence of his brooding when he found it rudely interrupted, yet again, by Mrs. Lovett. The woman insisted on doing it several times daily. However, it dawned on him that this was not her usual inane babble; instead of her usual light hearted tone she was acting serious. Was it possible that she was actually trying to tell him something?" "What?"

"Didja not hear me, Mr. T? I just told you. My sister wrote to me and asked--Well, actually, she's not me sister. Parents adopted her actually, she musta been 'bout 9 or 10, I was 'bout 8-"

Sweeney Todd growled. "Get to the point."

"Oh well, you know. She came from France, hadda bit of a tragic chil'hood, family was killed by twin aristocrats or something; her sister was raped by one after 'er husband was harnessed to a cart and starved, father died o' a broken heart. 'Er brother sent 'er away to protect 'er, then went to go duel the-"

"The point, Mrs. Lovett!"

"She's a bit revenge-obsessed. Sorta like another I could mention. Wants to wipe ou' the last o' the family who destroyed hers an' I used ta help 'er plan, jus' for fun ya know. She's askin' me if I can' somehow get hold of a Charles Darnay and ge' 'im to her, or finish him off me-self."

Sweeney Todd caressed his razor as he turned to the large window, overlooking the scurrying, dirty masses. "In that case, Mrs. Lovett. Tell your 'sister' we would be more than happy to oblige."


	2. Just Beginning

_No reviews! -sniff- Well, I understand that most people probably wouldn't get the Tale of Two Cities connection, so I wrote another chapter with Nellie and her adopted sister as children. If you don't get it, Therese turns out to be the infamous Madame Defarge, a highly influential and important (and fictional) leader of the French Revolution. (She makes a register of those to be killed by knitting their names into a scarf.) She rather reminded me of Sweeney Todd._

* * *

"Come on Therry! The water is warm."

"Warm for May, you mean. Your toes are turning blue"

The two girls were at a stream, one was wading in the water with bare feet and skirts hiked up to her knees. The other, "Therry", stood on the bank with her arms crossed.

"You should be happier, Therese," said the first girl, Nellie, picking up a slimy stone from the swirling water that was dark with soot, mud, and refuse. She tossed the stone in her hands a few times, then threw it as far as she could.

"I will not be happy. If I am happy I will forget the sorrow of my people and the need to avenge my family"

"I did not understand all that, but I understood most. You say it often enough." This statement could be explained by the fact that the two girls were speaking French even though they were currently in the fields of England. Nellie's parents, who could not read or write, were bilingual for some reason unknown to Nellie. Hoping to make her more attractive to a male of a higher class in society, they had taught her both English and French from an early age. At her current age of 8 she could speak French well enough to converse with Therese.

Therese had come from France and spoke no English. Her family, as she constantly reminded Nellie, had been destroyed by twin aristocratic brothers. Her brother had sent her to England to keep her safe from the Evremondes, before going to challenge them to a duel in hopes of restoring the family honor. "Of course I say it often," scoffed the older girl. "I must never forget, and I shall never forgive them." She pulled her heavy shawl tighter around her shoulders, her large earrings glinting dully as she glanced up at the overcast sky.

"Well, how are you going to do it then?"

"Do what?" She looked sharply at Eleanor.

"Kill them, of course." Nellie's brown eyes widened as they looked at Therese with innocence. "You are planning to. I know you think of it." Her wiry red hair, proof of unacknowledged Irish blood on one side of the family, bounced as she rocked on the balls of her feet.

"Of course I am going to kill them. Vermin like them do not deserve to live."

"How are you going to kill them?" Brown eyes grew even larger with curiosity.

Therese glared at her adoptive sister, angry that she had caught her without a definite plan. "I don't know. I was just going to kill them, nice and slow, with a knife... Watch their blood as it spills and they beg me for mercy." A cruel grin grew on her face as she pictured her enemies' torment.

"What about the bodies?"

"What do you mean?"

"You have to do something with the bodies. If the aristocrats know you killed two, then they kill you also, Therry." She stepped out of the filthy stream and began to shove on her scuffed shoes.

"Then let them kill me. I shall have had my revenge. If it means my life for it to be fulfilled, then so be it." The colorful scarf wrapped tightly about her head that made her appear almost gypsy-like fluttered violently as the wind increased.

Nellie stood up, fixing her skirt as she contemplated. "But what if they couldn't kill you...?"

"What do you mean, Nellie?" demanded Therese. "They have more ways of killing people than there are trees on Earth. Of course they can kill me, and they will."

"But if life in France is as hard as you say it is... Other people would be mad at other aristocrats too. What if... What if they killed other aristocrats? If they were all dead, they could not kill you." She looked at Therese to verify her idea.

The French girl scoffed, "That is madness. How would that happen? Even if God and Satan worked together, such a thing could not happen."

Skinny hands found hips as Nellie glared, "It could. It would be like..." she struggled for an unknown word. "Like what happned in America, or in 1688 with King James II..."

"You mean a revolution?"

Nellie shrugged, not knowing the word.

"Yes, if all the peasants turned at once against their cruel masters. We have many more than they. They would be overwhelmed. They would all be dead; all of the vermin-filth in their fine clothes with their many servants, their blood spilling across the streets." Her eyes glowed with ecstasy, and Nellie, although not fully coprehending the whole speech, got caught up in the mood and grinned broadly.

"Will you noose them all? Hang them from the street-lights?" she asked with morbid curiosity.

"No. Their blood deserves to be spilled. We shall find some other manner of killing them. And they shall all fall... And a glorious new order shall be created!"

Nellie looked back at the stream. "I do wish I could live by the sea. Imagine how nice it would be, living where the water isn't black..."

"Pardon?" Nellie had spoken in English.

"Nothing. Come on, we had better get home to help Mother with the pies."

* * *

_Ooookay. That was odd. I published this story back on 8/10/08, but it appears that when I added the second chapter it redid the whole story or something. Ah well. I don't pretend to understand. Everything seems to be alright..._


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